


deathless

by togethertheyfightcrime



Series: ghost stories [1]
Category: Black Widow – Freeform, Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Brainwashing, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Soldiers, Evil Doctors - Freeform, Female Protagonist, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, I can't believe there's a tag for 'red room people', Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Literary References & Allusions, Memory Loss, Morality, Mythology - Freeform, Mythology References, Natasha-centric, POV Natasha Romanov, Pre-Avengers (2012), Pre-Canon, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Russian Mythology, Weapons, for once in my fic-writing career, haphazard usage of Russian words, implied Bucky/Steve - Freeform, where Natasha really got her bullet scar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 12:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6329380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togethertheyfightcrime/pseuds/togethertheyfightcrime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, Natalia knew the story of a deathless man. His soul was in a needle – or in the eye of a needle – and it was found by a stolen daughter. </p><p> </p><p>Or: the Winter Soldier is awoken from ice to train a child in the Red Room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	deathless

Once upon a time Natalia heard a story. It was the story of a creature – or perhaps a child – whose soul could fly out from its body and go into the winds. There, it could see everything on the world below, and it could sculpt the clouds like the wind did with its breath that came from no one. Then the soul could return to its body (or did the body call back its soul, Natalia wondered). But if the sleeping, soulless body was moved from its place, the soul could never find home again. The body would be empty, forever and forever, and the soul would wander in the winds until it was blown into nothingness. 

 

Then the body wakes, thinks Natalia. And there is red, and red, and red.

 

...

 

All is white. Snow cradles the earth, and for all her life, she will remember only this–

 

 

 

Spires of orange burning heat stabbing at the air around her, and the great pain in her chest from the air gone thick and grey is like a chasm crumbling beneath her ribs, and there are tears carving her cheeks and her throat is raw from screaming ( _mama – mamasha – help me!_ ) and stars like ash sear white into the night sky. 

 

Her feet are stumbling and then hands in gloves reach down for her, and then there is nothing–

 

 

 

_Ours,_ grinned the faces she couldn’t see, the voices in her sleep. _Ours now, Natalia._

 

...

 

She falls and falls and falls again, but she always finds a way back up, like she is told to do. She is a thing formed for fighting, and she does as she was made. The walls are red, redder than the fire and the blood and the long hair of a woman she almost remembers–

 

Memories get sticky inside the halls of pulsing colors, between the hands that strike her down and the voices and the hurt. She thinks she remembers dancing – remembers flames –

 

She thinks she remembers a voice that held her warmly as a blanket, a whisper-soft embracing – _Natalia, malyshka, Natasha my girl_ –

 

 

 

_Vstayete! Vstayete, devochka!_

 

She always gets up.

 

_..._

 

_A unique specimen_ , one of the men with medals tells her trainers. No one has said it, but Natalia knows the men with medals come to perform inspections – of the program, of the rooms, of the _devochki_. So Natalia stands with her spine columned into a knife-straight line and shoulders thrown back, chin out and eyes looking nowhere. _A_ krovopiytsa _, this Widow shall be. A fierce little warrior._

 

Even with curls fight-tousled and long, the tip of her head does not come to any of their stomachs. 

 

_You have done well,_ the man with medals says, but he is talking to the trainers, not her. Natalia knows this. _It is time, I believe, that she meets the specialist. Do you not agree?_

 

Natalia hears: the faint shift in stance from one of her scrawnier trainers, the tremulous one who teaches her languages and countries and nothing at all about killing the people in them. He speaks to the man with medals, and Natalia knows before he finishes the shaking man will be in trouble. _She is only a mite of a thing, she is not yet ready for_ –

 

The slap rings through the room. The next morning, the trainer is gone, like so many before, and there is a new man with a stone-still face awaiting Natalia. 

 

And there is a man with an arm of metal awaiting her too.

 

...

 

Once upon a time Natalia had worlds of her own. In her sleep, she would sink into them, the places strange and true. They held what had been, and sometimes what could be. Natalia cannot find those worlds anymore. 

 

Sometimes they were wonderful, and sometimes they were so terrible she could scarcely breathe. There were monsters. Creatures. Knights, made all of metal, who killed the monsters, but killed the people, too. 

 

...

 

_He is an assassin. His skills are very specific,_ devochka. _No other could share those skills with you._

 

She is not to anger him. She is never to question him. Never. Never. 

 

...

 

Natalia can strangle men with wires thin as hair and sharp as knives. She can bring a soldier to his knees and not even lose her breath. She can strike between the eyes a running target from twenty meters, and a sitting target from fifty, and she knows what veins to slice with her knives to make all the blood come out. But Natalia is best of all at listening. 

 

Yet even her trainers do not seem to know the truth of the soldier. Not really. What they tell her without speaking is this: he is only sometimes brought out to use his skills (which are for killing, but here, everything is). All other times, as far as Natalia can tell, he sleeps in ice. Like a dead man. 

 

He is important, more important than any Widow, any of the _devochki_ , any project of the rooms, and his name is known to comrades Natalia has never seen.

 

They are afraid of him. That truth hides behind the quick stuttering of their eyes away from him whenever he stands in a room, behind the way their voices grow quiet and subdued when they speak to him. He is their creation, he is deathless, and they fear him. 

 

(Deep within herself, Natalia wonders if they will ever fear her, too.)

 

He is a black shadow against the furious red. A ghost story.

 

...

 

Once upon a time Natalia knew a story of a deathless man. He was not a ghost, but a monster. His soul was in a needle – or in the eye of a needle – 

 

His name, she thinks, was _Kost_ – bone – or something near to that. And he was ancient, and stole a daughter. And one day, she found his soul within a needle, and then he–

 

But the memory is deep within the worlds Natalia lost.

 

...

 

He has a title the men call him, but Natalia is not to address him, only obey his orders. Yet when he duels with her, his voice is low, and his orders are few, and if he knocks her down, he picks her back up. Roughly, and his grip is tight, but it is always the flesh arm. Never once has he gripped her with the metal arm whose fingers can shatter bone.

 

Natalia has forgotten she is a child, but the Winter Soldier has not.

 

And his eyes are not empty and they are not dead – they flicker like coals and probe all that is around him, and all he sees he remembers. It means he is no blank-voiced _soldat_ : he is like Natalia. They think they own him, but they do not own what he sees, and they cannot stop his thoughts.

 

( _Can they_? Natalia thinks, with the ache of a feeling she does not understand.)

 

Yet he is stronger than Natalia, so much so. Sometimes the pain and the shaking and the aches of her weak body, her deficient strength, means she will collapse on the ground and cannot – for all she shrieks and fights and fights till her muscles would tear from her bones – cannot get up. 

 

Then she finds a place deep in her mind and she hides there, like a coward, because when she cannot get up, they hurt her until she can. And when the soldier comes forward, arcing down to grasp Natalia’s shaking body, a fearful whimper comes from her mouth even as she burrows deep into her own darkness–

 

Warm fingers push away the sweat and hair caking her face. Light like moth’s wings flutters gently on her eyelids, she is lifted to the air, and the voice that whispers over her is quiet. She cannot understand the words, but this voice is a voice that promises no pain.

 

In the webs of her own mind, Natalia begins to know him. Just a little. The red-star man, the sometimes-soldier. A man who dares to pick up the small and the fallen. With the star on his arm bright as fire and his eyes so shadowed and lost. 

 

...

 

_You must walk silently, Natalia_ , the soldier tells her, and Natalia is frustrated, because her body burns and the air has been for days tense around them with unspoken words from the outer world, and because her trainers have already taught her how to step without making noise. She even dares to tell the soldier so.

 

He does not strike her. Beneath the darkness staining the space below his eyes, behind the sweeping brown of his tangled hair, Natalia thinks the soldier’s lips quirk up.

 

_Not all ears are as deaf as the ones down here_ , and the disrespect is so blatant Natalia’s breath actually stutters as she waits for the soldier to be punished for it. _We assassins must not make so much as a whisper._

 

Natalia nods, thinks, _we assassins_. This is something she is part of, and she alone, save the soldier. They tell Natalia she will become one of the Widows, she will serve the Motherland and make her proud, but Natalia knows only red walls and rough voices and the subtle whine of the knives she sends into the hearts of her targets, sharp as a spider’s sting. 

 

There is no Motherland for Natalia, but there is a man with a crown of tousled hair who shows her how to walk lighter than snowfall and breathe as silently as a ghost. 

 

_..._

 

_He has been too long unfrozen_ , a scientist is saying quietly when Natalia wakes. It is a common procedure: an injection and a sleep, and she awakes surrounded by murmuring voices and white-coated men and humming silver equipment she does not recognize. Needles prick her and wires stick to her skin, and Natalia breathes as faintly as the falling of dust. But the man is not speaking of Natalia today; he is speaking of her metal-armed trainer. So Natalia does not open her eyes, not just yet. She listens.

 

_It is dangerous to allow the Soldier his own mind for so long_. _Remember–_

 

_My memory reaches further than yours, comrade; I know what has been done. But this procedure cannot be halted. Conditioning is delicate, more so than the mind_. He stops speaking briefly, and Natalia hears a rustle of fabric and then feels eyes upon her, close and watching. Stiller than the dead, she waits. Waits as though she is frozen in ice.

 

Then the tension is gone and the man moves away and continues: _It is a risk we can take to create this Black Widow_.

 

_Me,_ Natalia thinks, and she is certain now that her trainer with his red star is more than a _soldat_ – he is the Soldier. He is meant for her. 

 

...

 

He speaks English sometimes, the Soldier. He speaks it like one who has lived years with a language settled deep in his throat, like the tiny doctor with his thick glasses spoke his German, like the man whose screams echoed hollow through the halls for days had cried out _š'il vous plaît, ne me fait mal plus._

 

_A study in scarlet_ , _huh,_ he says, twisted and wry, to the puddling blood of the young man Natalia’s trainers brought in. Natalia remains in her stance, still and perfect and tall as the Soldier’s elbow – she has grown, so swiftly in the past months that one of the doctors complained and fretted until he didn’t return to the next procedure. The dead young man’s eyes are open and wide and black like night.

 

_A deserter_ , they told the soldier, but to Natalia, _a target for your knife_. It slipped daintily between his ribs before the boy could so much as scream.

 

Natalia takes a moment to rub the skin of her fingers together where a moment ago the knife waited, thrumming with the same tension her nerves did as she aligned herself, shifted her stance, and threw in the space between heartbeats. Then she says, _That is English._ She almost does not realize that she replies in English, too.

 

(There had been a scrawny trainer, whose throat molded around languages and whose fingers traced pale outlines of distant places – hadn’t there?)

 

_An English book_ , _little_ pauk, he says, in a voice belonging to far away. _An old one, he read it to–_

 

Then there are thin lines of questioning curling around his eyes, like he has forgotten how he knows what he knows. Natalia knows those lines, feels them knotting her thoughts and tangling her memories every moment. 

 

It is a long while before the soldier speaks in English again.

 

_..._

 

_You fight like a dancer_ , the Soldier tells her, after Natalia has felled the sawdust-stuffed man by wrapping her legs round his neck and weaving a web with her swift and stinging body.

 

Natalia slips silently to the ground, balancing her crouch with a delicate hand. _I don’t understand_.

 

_Like a ballerina_ , _twirling around_ , he tells her, gesturing at the fallen sawdust man.

 

A flinch ripples through Natalia’s body. _I don’t – I don’t know what –_

 

But she is lying, she thinks. She is lying without knowing what truth it is she hides.

 

(Natalia dreamed of dancing, once. Of spinning in a skirt as fine and wide as birds’ wings.)

 

...

 

The Soldier teaches her the calls of birds, saying their names first in Russian, then in English, then sending their cries tearing through the scarlet room, echoing toward the sky.

 

_The_ yastreb, he says, _hawk_. _The swiftest of all the birds, the sharpest-eyed._

 

It means hawks are the best of the birds, realizes Natalia, and she does not forget it.

 

...

 

They are pulling apart the pieces of rifles nearly tallier and heavier than Natalia herself. Her muscles move of their own accord and take the weapon to pieces: this is the only time and the only way she is ever allowed to make a thing of war harmless. _Soldat_ , Natalia says, and then her words swell in her throat, choking her. She is not to question him. She is never to question him. 

 

The Soldier has not yet finished pulling his own gun apart, Natalia notices. He makes his twisting smile and says, _Natalia?_

 

Natalia breathes. Thinks of hawks, spinning on warm columns of distant air. Of dancers and warriors. _Soldat, do you know your name_?

 

A ghost would not know. Natalia is not quite certain her name is her own, even. The others who could have been Widows were given names, before they were taken away and not spoken of. At first Natalia tried to remember them all, but she forgets so much. There is too much to keep.

 

She cannot see the Soldier’s face, the way he has hung his head. 

 

_Yasha_ , he whispers. _I have been called Yasha. Yakov. Stefan. But I think – I think –_

 

He is silent, the rest of that day. Natalia keeps listening. When they spar, the next day, he is wordless as the dead, until her knife is at his throat and she hears him say, soft like a breath, _James. I was James once._

 

An English name, Natalia marvels. The Soldier could have been a foreigner. An enemy. Anything, anyone at all. 

 

( _I could too_ , she thinks.)

 

_Or – or that’s not it. Or the memories aren’t mine. They do that to you, Natasha. Put a whole damn world in your head. And all of it lies._

 

…

 

_Do you know your name?_ he asks her once. _The name you had before this place?_

 

They are staring, from a high ledge on the mountain that holds the rooms, down to a moon-washed expanse with night sepulchering the horizon. Natalia counts heartbeats, counts breaths, fixes her eyes on the crosshairs of the rifle. Aligns it with one of the faceless smudges of people below, released into this deserted, treeless landscape by the men who make assassins: prisoners of the rooms given a chance to escape, so the _devochki_ might have practice with moving targets. 

 

The trigger seems to depress before Natalia’s finger has brushed it. Through the scope, a spray of blood upon snow; the dead man falls, the other one flees from what his body portends. 

 

She breaths out. _There is nothing before this place_. 

 

It was a quick death, this shot: her hands have not shaken. A bullet to the center of the body, and stillness descends more swiftly than hawk’s wings. Before, when her nameless trainers took her to practice rifles, it took many shots for Natalia to make the targets stop moving. As if something in the smallness of her hands had sensed the convulsing of the dying bodies below, and tried to share in that final broken dance. 

 

_You were born. You had a mother once._

 

Natalia’s heartbeats come faster. _If I had a mother–_ She tries to aim and sees only this sudden, choking anger. _Then so did_ you _._

 

The Soldier does not say anything at all.

 

Far below the shelf of rock where she and the Soldier rest on their elbows, the running man rises up between her crosshairs. While her breaths unspool Natalia watches the fierce, tumbling livelihood of his movements: every desperate breach of space by his sprinting feet is driven by that impossible will to _live –_ to be the one who hides from the face of death. Natalia watches.

 

( _What if_ , she wonders between heartbeats, _I let them run. Only once. If I left them to this night. I could, I could._ )

 

_I had a mother_ , the Soldier says, like it is a question. _My mother had – someone small. Someone else. Hair like you but dark. She sang to herself when she couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I hear that, if I am alone._

 

Natalia has never sung before. 

 

…

 

No one comes for the bodies of those killed by the rooms. They are thrown to the wasteland, left to the emptiness and the birds. Beneath the snow are all their bones, worn thin as needles, ragged as knives.

 

… 

 

It comes as swift and screaming as hawks, this memory, and it cleaves her breath in two.

 

Natalia remembers: 

 

( _running from-_ redblood fire – _Natasha devochka, vstayete my girl_ –)

 

She was afraid. She is afraid. She has been afraid for all her years, and that is all there is now. The world of fear and red.

 

They spar, they assassins, the day Natalia’s fear become her own again. She parries a blow from his flesh arm. She has never had to parry a blow from his metal arm, because the blows that come from it do not land. In the language of the people who make her afraid, Natalia thinks: _that’s a weakness. That is what you use_. 

 

In her mind, in the hollows where worlds once were, she dares to think: _he truly won’t hurt me_. 

 

To believe something, it must be seen. Natalia knows this. So she creates a world where she can believe the Soldier will never, ever make her hurt. 

 

She springs up: the Soldier had punched forward with his metal arm, and she seizes it and pushes against it to launch herself. Wraps her legs around his neck and chokes. The Soldier scrabbles at her knees and ankles, locked all around his throat, then pitches back and forth trying to throw Natalia off. 

 

Time is disassembled into the barest fractions of blinks. Natalia waits for the Soldier to pitch forward again, for all of his weight to lean down as he tries to catapult her body off of his: then fast as gunfire she unwinds her limbs from the Soldier’s neck and springs back, away, with the force of her feet on his spine – the Soldier, all his weight tipped forwards, topples down – Natalia has a knee boring down on his neck and his flesh arm twisted to the precipice of snapping before she has taken her next breath.

 

This is what the Soldier sees: there is no way to tear Natalia off of him, unless he seizes her with his metal arm – the arm he was _given_ , not the arm which belonged to his nameless self in the unknowable past. The arm whose red star glares even through ice.

 

This is what Natalia sees: the Soldier, who could have been James, who is not smiling, but is very still. Very stiff, like a body frozen in winter.

 

_You win, Natalia_. There is no breathing in this silence. If this wasn’t training, Natalia knows what she’d do now.

 

No, Natalia tries to say. Her body pulls itself away, presses her spine against the cold walls of the training room painted red-black like blood. 

 

Winning wasn’t – she hadn’t meant – she only wanted to be certain. (If she has learned to beat the Soldier, she does not need his training anymore, and they will take him away–) Needed to be certain. Not to win against the Soldier, to take his weakness and make it her weapon. (That is what she is made to do. That is not what she wanted to do.) _No._

 

If it had been anyone else, Natalia would do as she was made – but not the Soldier. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t mean it. 

 

Something hurts in her eyes. A hot liquid stinging. She thinks she’s bleeding from the whites of her eyes, that her trainers and the doctors and the men with medalled chests have felt her failure inside and are finally shutting her body down – surely they are killing her, her heartbeat’s turned to gunfire and her chest is an earthquaking cavern and the drops falling from her bleeding eyes look clear to her, somehow,as clear as raindrops – 

 

_I didn’t mean it_ –

 

_Hush, Natasha_ , he tells her very softly. The tone is gentle; the volume is afraid. Afraid of those who might hear the gentleness: Natalia understands, with a sudden shock, the risk the Soldier has taken every time he refused to hurt her, or wound her, or treat her like the trainers do. Every time he called her by another name. They fear him, in the red room, because they have hurt him, and given him cause to hate them. They fear him, so they will hurt him more, anytime they can, so they might pretend to themselves they are stronger than the Soldier.

 

_You did as they’ve told you. Don’t cry, Natalia. You only did what you know to do._

 

_I didn’t, I didn’t want to–_

 

_Hey, Tasha, look at me. Hey. I know you didn’t._ English now. The warm hand on her face, wiping the clear blood from her cheeks that isn’t blood at all. _God, you’re so little. Oh, God. Just a kid._

 

Who is God, Natalia wonders. The trainers and doctors curse that name, sometimes; the dead often cry it in their last living gasps. How can they all know God, the killers and the killed? And the Soldier, too? 

 

_I am n-not,_ Natalia manages, stuttering her way through the English, _not a kid. I am like you_. 

 

_I know,_ the Soldier says. _You are. I’m so sorry, Natasha_. 

 

…

 

There is no talk between Natalia and James of running, of embracing that unspoken word(defective) _defection_. It is something immediately known, a necessity of the Soldier’s defeat (they will see it in the films of the training sessions – see Natalia has learned all she can from the Soldier, see the Soldier use softness as an unweapon in the face of their _devochka_ ’s tears). It is an impossible mission, to escape the ice and the things that will come for them. Their failure is as certain as death, as certain as it is that Natalia and James will try until they can try no longer.

 

When sleep quiets the halls, save for the pacing of the night guards, Natalia waits for the gap between the men who pass the door of her quarters. 

 

(Before the Soldier woke to train her, she was one sleeper of many in rows of camp beds with each girl upon them handcuffed in place. Now, she is still cuffed to the metal frame in her dim hollow of a room, but she has not seen the other _devochki_ in a very long time. Natalia knows why. It is easier to focus on your training when there is no possibility of competition amongst comrades. It is easier to eliminate a failed _devochka_ on a trainer’s orders when they are not the girl who cries next to you at night.)

 

Natalia stretches her wrists in their handcuffs, one circle of metal below each hand cinching her arms to the bunk. Then she pulls her left hand out through its cuff, forcing the dull ache of a dislocated thumb to be only an inessential announcement from her nerves, and uses the other four fingers of the hand to remove a thin bent wire from between her underclothes and skin. 

 

Picking the lock of her handcuffs is simple (her trainers taught her to trick locks when she was too small for rifles), and Natalia pauses only to pull on double layers of her heaviest clothing. Weapons, she can retrieve from one of the training rooms or storage chambers once she and the Soldier have rendezvoused. If there is time enough, James will put Natalia’s thumb back in place before they run.

 

But the Soldier is waiting for her, outside of her quarters. He is armed, gloved, carrying two packs, and clutching the weapons Natalia prefers. She hides a knife on each leg and boot, sheaths one knife at her ribs and a pistol at her back, holsters two handguns at her waist, and takes the proffered pack. Clinks muffled by cloth and a faint sloshing tell her there are weapons, blankets, and rations within. The Soldier has been working for many hours, then– there will be dead already, fallen witnesses who will be witnessed themselves, and soon an alarm raised. 

 

They run. 

 

They are as swift and silent as smoke: it is too dark to even see the red of the halls. They outrun the seconds preceding the alarm, meeting the few guards who cross their path with the Soldier’s metal hand about their necks or a minute silver flickering from Natalia’s knives.

 

The Soldier leads them out by way of their sniper post, the ledge in the mountain in the cold land Natalia has so scarcely seen. The night air is drenched with a deep, raw cold. There is a sheer drop to a sloping wasteland below, with grey clouds sheathing the dark above them; the Soldier drops his pack and tears it open to reveal an immense coil of rope. With the swiftness of practice he secures it to the shelf of rock they have killed from. Then he tells Natalia to climb upon his back. 

 

_I can climb._

 

_It’s faster if we go together. Any minute, they’ll see that we’re gone–_

 

_Would they cut our rope? Will they try to shoot us?_

 

The Soldier looks down at Natalia. _No_ , he says. _They won’t kill us. Do you understand, Natalia? They will never kill us. Only take us._

 

Fear bores against Natalia’s brow, aches her throat. She clambers onto the Soldier’s back and holds with all she has. In a single heave, he lowers them over the ledge and begins to scramble down the rope. Both hands, flesh and metal, are gloved; the rope sways them, rotates them so the blackness of rock before Natalia’s eyes flashes to broad untouchable land, to deep blackness again. 

 

_James_ , she says to the Soldier’s left ear. _What if we fall_?

 

His breath scrapes deep within him, shudders out, as he climbs down. _I’ve fallen_ , he tells her, _before. But – I don't think I remember how._

 

One hundred meters from the ground. The wind wails about the peaks and heights of the mountain. Fifty meters. Natalia’s limbs clatter with pain; can she even unwind them from the Soldier’s back, when the time comes? Twenty-five meters – the Soldier lets his hands skim on the rope, more flight then fall – 

 

Natalia feels the thunder of the snow-pressed ground through the Soldier’s boots echoing up into her bones. He doesn’t stop for her to climb down, for breath to find its way back into him: James _runs_ , faster than any dead man to ever cross that frozen land.

 

Then comes the gunshot from the place they have left behind.

 

…

 

Natalia once remembered the story of a man with a name like bone, like death declined. Was he a cruel man? Natalia wonders. Perhaps. That is what time will wreak, when not even death can find you. And if death has found everyone who made your living a life–

 

What difference is there between cruel and alone? (Between cruel and afraid?) If the alone lasts beyond what memory can hold? (If the fear is all that ever shapes the opposite of death?)

 

If someday, somehow, the lonely and deathless things were not alone and enduring any longer: what are they then, where once they were cruel? What can be held in the empty places?

 

(Maybe, thinks Natalia, in the mind that is her own, the soul trapped by the sky can never find its body again. But maybe it can find a place to rest.)

 

…

 

If there were frozen seconds for Natalia to think, between the sound of the first gunshot and the moment the Soldier tore her from his back, Natalia would have thought: _who are they willing to lose?_

 

( _They’ll never kill us_ , the Soldier had warned. Then why had they shot at them?)

 

If there was time even for breathing, between the sound of the second gunshot and the moment the Soldier throws Natalia’s body beneath his own, covers her body with his own, Natalia would have thought: _who are they willing to lose?_

 

(A _devochka_ , or the Winter Soldier? A girl with no memories, perhaps no real name, one of the flock of _devochki_ who spend their sleep chained by their small wrists – or the man who wears their star and belongs to their ice, their greatest soldier?)

 

If there had been time enough for James to shield Natalia fully, the bullet would have torn through James’s right lower back, shattered his pelvis, ripped his small intestine. But there was not time enough. The bullet, instead, plunges through the space above Natalia’s left hip, bores through and out of her and buries itself in the frosted ground. 

 

Natalia’s screaming shatters the air. 

 

( _We assassins must not make so much as a whisper._ )

 

It is a fiercer agony than any she has ever borne. Natalia has been tested in her endurance, back in the rooms, but never with such raw and tearing pain. Her body shakes in the Soldier’s grasp; his breath turns low, ragged, a tumult of fright and grief. 

 

(He screams _NO!_  to the night. 

 

He screams _FUCK YOU!_ to the men with medals, the men with needles, the men with guns. The men who make assassins.

 

He screams _SHE IS NOT YOURS. I AM NOT YOURS. WE WILL NEVER BE YOURS._

 

He doesn’t do this. In another time, another life, the man who is a shadow beneath his bones might have screamed these things – but not this man, who questions even his name.)

 

He does not scream anything at all. Instead, James pulls a handgun from his side holster, flicks off the safety and cocks it with a sweep of the thumb, before pressing it bruise-fierce to his temple. Finger on the trigger. Eyes on only Natalia and her blood blackening the snow. 

 

The men who make assassins can see the Soldier in their scopes: surely they can understand his intent. James is his own hostage. If they shoot Natalia again, he will shoot himself. If they dare to tranquilize him, they risk his finger jarring the trigger as he falls. Is the risk of killing their greatest asset worth the trouble they’ll consider hunting him down to be?

 

Stillness reigns – save Natalia’s sobbing. Blood seems to burble between her fingers, pressed upon the hole above her hip. Tendrils of pain radiate through her body, turning every gasp to a red shock of nerves.

 

Tears are carving her cheeks; screaming rips her throat raw. Stars like ash sear white into the night sky, eking lines across the silhouette of James with a gun to his head. _Will they take us_ , Natalia wants to cry. _Will they take our minds. Will they make you sleep again_.

 

Natalia fights and fights with all her strength to get up, but pain rips the world from her and she is falling away from James’s shadow, falling–

 

...

 

Once upon a time Natalia knew the story of the deathless man. His soul was in a needle, hidden deep beneath a cold land in a vast ocean. 

 

Once a daughter went away to war while the deathless man was chained below the earth. And one day, she found his soul within a needle thin as hair, bright as snow. Through the needle’s eye she saw worlds entire, places great and wonderful for the children and the righteous to enter. 

 

She saw no place for her. No place for the deathless things. 

 

The daughter, who was a warrior, a widow, a wonder – she broke the needle and prayed to the open sky that she could grant her one gift to the deathless man, the only gift she knew how to give–

 

...

 

(All is white. Ice is smothering the world.)

 

...

 

But they lived. And lived. And _lived_.

**Author's Note:**

> TW for canon-typical violence committed by a child, references to evil doctors doing evil things, the Red Room sucking, sad brainwashed assassins of all ages. Apologies for any mistakes in my haphazard Russian (or brief attempt at French). 
> 
> The creature whose soul can fly from its body and into the winds is a [zduhác](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zduha%C4%87), which is a Serbian myth but shhh. Otherwise, the deathless man Natalia refers to is [Koschei the Deathless,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Koschei_the_Deathless) who is lucky enough to have the fantastic warrior princess Marya Morevna feature in his story.
> 
> I have some thoughts and a few things written for a potential sequel, canonical or otherwise. What do you guys think?


End file.
